Archana Online.com

Wanna know why I have been busy and not posting any blog posts off late? Well, there are many reasons, but for now, the fetish of home decor has creeped onto me. Maybe, being a house wife and being at home, initiated this in my mind. I do try to minimize the expenditure due to this newly found interests, though sometimes it goes out of hand.

There was a time, when I used to cringe at a book or magazine if it cost more than Rs.20. Now I am buying occasionally magazines of Rs.100 just to look at the style pictures and drool over it. One thing I realized is, there is no such home decor magazine meant for middle class people. Most of the cover story deals with highly priced luxury items, which makes us think that home decor is expensive, while I believe its contrary. The creative ideas, and simple ways of rearranging, and making re-use of old items are mostly inexpensive. Then, as usual, I latched onto the greatest resource of all. The internet. The innumerous blogs by interior decorators, or designers, or photographers, created just by passion gives a whole lot of ideas than those highly priced books. Read the rest of this entry »

In Webscape Tidbits Part 7, let us see some tools and utilities along with what all you can do with your photos!

Photo fun effects

Okay, you have so many photos of Christmas and New Year holidays. Now what? How about some digital processing? Adding some photo effects? Sounds cool, huh? Good, now check out the websites below to start with!

The first common task done by people is to upload their photos straight to Flickr, Picasaweb, Photobucket, Orkut and Facebook. But before sharing pictures, why not have some fun?

If you had liked the Photofun post, then here are few more to play with your photos: Read the rest of this entry »

Clearing out Google Reader is a mess. Especially if you are checking them after the vacation. There are 1000+ items in my reader now, to be read by me.

You can easily escape saying, why did you subscribe to them first of all. But that’s where I store all my sources of good read. Just the source. It may or may not contain the best sources. But the journey mostly starts here, if its a blank slate. It then accelerates through clicks and many other interesting websites.

On an overall peek, I found, most of the posts are collections of the past year 2008. The best posts, the popular posts, the top posts, and so and so. Gradually I started making note of all of them one by one, Then suddenly it struck me, why not create a post on it. Rather an aggregated version of all the best collections from various websites. So I started writing this, to form another post of webscape series.

Webscape was started to share off my link love and also to make note of any good links. To read other posts on webscape, click here. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to the 5th episode of the Webscape Tidbits. This time, I have just few links compared to the ten given in the last post.

1. Ever wondered if you could write a secret letter to someone and blurt out your feelings? Ever imagined how people go about suppressing their emmotions or waving it off in the form of a curse, or forgiveness or play of life? Ever wished that you could convey your wishes to the old friend whose whereabouts is unknown? So there is one such website where your could post/submit your letter to the mailbox and they will publish the letter for you if you are lucky!

2. I had been going through this phase of life many times and even recently. I am sure, any blogger, who writes casually do fall for the disease of writer’s block sometime or the other. There are many ways to get out of this, by either taking up tags, or writing random thoughts or by bouncing back automatically with time. There are websiets which says how to overcome the writer’s block by keeping on writing, no matter what nonsense it is…. Great!

3. As mentioned earlier about the bookshelf, there were time, when I was crazy with books, and thought I would be a great reader and follow the paths of great writers by reading a lot..During those times, I searched for top reads or best sellers etc, and came across this site, which mentions about the 100 must read books. Now, apart from few classics, I haven’t even heard of those books ever. Nevertheless, its a great site, which contains reviews of so much books, including the plot too!! Saves time in selecting a book!!!!

4. These days, I have been smitten by blogomania, which means to stumble upon blogs, and read blog posts, and if the disease is on the high, you even subscribe to it, through Google reader or any other bookmarks! So although the below blogs may have been already popular, I came across them only recently, and few of them made me laugh so much that, if I had an award and trophies for humourous blogs, I would have given them right away….

a. Domain Mazimus – Strange blog title I know, but it gives the explanation too…
b. Mirror Cracked – Another cupid victim!
c. This music gives you, rather gave me, a refreshing wave of Chennai thoughts and memories, along with this good personal blogger from Chennai…

Soft music and rather addicting right??? Though I would now prefer to fast numbers so as to prevent my blackmailing trap of random thoughts pulls me in. So listening to Pyaar ki yeh kahaani suno from the film Honeymoon travels Pvt. Ltd. Absolutely mesmerizing dance performance there!!! So while I enjoy the music and stumble across various websites, go along and take a break or if you don’t want to, keep following me on twitter or read on other episodes of Webscape!!!

Hope you all enjoyed this episode of webscape. Keep pouring in your suggestions at so n so. Till I come back with another Webscape escapade, this is Archana aka crazy bluediamond signing off..

Webscape is back. I would try not to miss them again, but it actually depends on the various stumbled sites of mine, and based on how others help me out in providing and discovering links through their sharing methods.

1. http://firef.ly/ – For people who use Facebook, might have noticed that you can chat with people who are visiting the site at the same time along with you. I guess Firefly is similar kinda application that can be used on any site…. But useful only if many are visiting the site simultaneously!

2. YouTube Video Download Tool – Recently, owing to the extreme availibility of my broadband connection, I am watching more and more you tube videos. But the wait for it to load completely is terrible. Hence this download tool is extremely efficient in downloading all the clips to watch at a later time. You need FLV player to play them.

3. Stumbled upon the cool wallpaper links from Smashing Magazine.

Read the rest of this entry »

After a long time fram gap, I am back with the internet tidbits.

1.Blackle was hitting the news a little while ago. And one of my colleague even shifted to Blackle instead of Google for searches. But I did wonder how it saved energy. Found an article cum discussion on does it really do or not??

2. Random objects/links/articles at smorgasborg. Got this link as email forward and the article regarding the invention of C++ lured me into the main site.

3. Top 100 webware sites. Just got a bunch of handy commonly used websites in one page..So bookmarked for now. Who knows, I may try them out, sometime in future…

4. Real Simple. There are enormous list of sites which can help you live life, make the most out of it, or even live a happy simple life. I guess this is just one of them. There maybe many more.

5. By the way, did I mention about the live science website where you can get to know more about the facts and discussions of life science?

Bonus: Try copying the character given below called “COMBINING CYRILLIC MILLIONS SIGN” and start writing from the next position. It starts typing backwards.
‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮҉

Why??

Netvibes: This site can be used for free as a collection of all feeds almost like My Yahoo or My Msn. It contains lot many modules and can be easily customized by the drag and drop feature.

Online FTP: Some people suggest inbuilt FTP from the browsers. I am yet to try such apps, but as of now, I use this online ftp method to access the ftp server of the blog.

Cheer up: A good guide to cheer you up whenever you feel low. It contains all the encouraging words for you to boost your spirits. Read on. You may feel that the nanny is available on net!!! Thanks to Ashwin for the link.

WordPress Plugins – Again!: Nowadays whenever I stumble upon blogs or sites, I have a special interest towards the sites or blogs wherever the word “plugins”, “themes”, “blog”, “earn” etc. Here are the few 3 I have in my list:

Life Hack
Tech Corner
John TP

Frequent mentioning of the plugins might have given you a hint already that I am planning to install lot many plugins and try them out, so you can expect another related post on the same.

And if you find any delay in between the posts, hang on, I may be just thinking how to jot it down…:D

Google Reader: Inspired from Ashwin’s posts on Google Reader, I had started using the RSS reader sometime ago, and I’m lovin’ it more n more day by day. It gives me lot inspiration to read n write and become active in this blogging world. So many blog posts created each day spanning several topics that the innovative idea of the RSS reader to share their favourites is highly appreciated. I don’t have much shared items but found that we can broadcast the marked items in our website as shown in the sidebar of my blog. Or you can share it using the direct link. I invite my readers to share their shared items/bookmarks etc.

Publicize: After reading so many posts on making money from blogging and adsense and publicizing, I am now randomly submitting my blog to most sites like Feed Burner, India Counts, Technorati etc. (By the way, wanna add my blog to Technorati favourites? )

WordPress plugins: I am planning to add the “Related Posts” plugin and some sidebar modifications. Thinking whether to add the Post rating plugin also. But too lazy to install n edit the themes… More over, I guess all my posts are related already, and coming to track popular or top rated ones, how do I know whether any posts can be popular or top rated, unless you, the readers, provide any feedback! So please provide me any feedback on plugins to be installed or for that matter any feedback is welcome. Meanwhile, lot of post topics pending, personal thoughts and meme’s..Hmm..

Songs/Lyrics Download: Last weekend when I was at home, I was searching lot sites which provides free download of songs and found some here n here.

WebSites: Came across some Indian sites while surfing for submitting my blog to them. Indian pad, India Counts and Best of Indya are among them.

The blog title inspired from Webscape of Click Online program aired in BBC World.